Transregional Islam in the Malay-Indonesian World: Legacies and New Dynamics

Abstract

Concerning culture and Islam, Western scholars were inclined to present these two countries as least Arabicised, and, especially in Indonesian studies, much emphasis has been given to portraying nominal Muslims, the so-called abangan;I will comment on the ‘myth of the abangan’ later. [...]scholarship has tended to revolve around the tracing of religious and cultural influences that entered and shaped Indonesia and Malaysia from the outside, especially from the Arab world. [...]the respectable position of the Haramayn has been in decline for the last few decades. Nowadays, other places in the Middle East, or elsewhere in the Muslim world, have come to assert their influence and, in turn, have left their impact on Muslim discourse in the Malay-Indonesian region. [...]since the 1980s, the discourse developed by such scholars as Abu al-A'la al-Mawdudi, Sayyid Qutb, Taqi al-Din al-Nabhani and Middle Eastern movements like al-Ikhwan al-Muslimun (and its splinter groups), Hizb al-Tahrir and the like have begun to find their way into Southeast Asia. According to Indonesian law